Since the question has been asked, I can tell you that Matron Mitchie has undergone an above-the-knee amputation. The second leg remains, for the moment. That is it, then.
He nodded to the matron and orderly. They left. Carradine was left gazing at the women in the tent with her mouth set.
Is he really in charge here? Honora asked her.
Carradine conceded he was.
The orderly put his head in again.
Nurse, he said as a command, and Carradine—after a pause that counted for minor rebellion—followed him out.
Holy Virgin, said Honora. Do you think that colonel creature has a wife?
Dr. Fellowes isn’t gone, Nettice assured them. I saw him on the deck of the Tirailleur, the destroyer.
Sally saw tears on Freud’s face and felt them pushing at her eyes—a little of her saturation rising. Those pitiable girls who had yelled fear and encouragement to each other in the ocean, and it had smothered them. They had howled and the water took its opportunity.
And Leonora, Freud contributed. Leonora’s not gone. They’re fated to last, she and Fellowes. They live on outside all complications.
In her conviction she looked dark and pretty and a little bit cracked. There was silence then, and a surge of wind and a scatter of small gravel and the sound of rain asserting itself.
They died in our place, Rosanna Nettice argued while sitting like the rest in a shirt that had belonged to French sailors. She did not unclench her brow. They were the tithe, weren’t they? God knew that with me he had taken too much and sent the horse to take me up again.
That was her map of what had happened, so they would not argue with her. Reveille ran with an instant’s delay from bugle to bugle and headland to headland and across the intervening lowlands of the harbor. It insisted even the dying hear it—and the women who were not as yet utterly convinced they had escaped drowning.
Other nurses arrived. They carried clothes with them—veils, blouses, shirts, and pullovers hostile to gender, some plain gray skirts, army pants, army boots. Wonderful Lemnos creatures—so assured of the air and so convinced of their own breath. They offered to show the Archimedes women where the water pump was and pointed out a washing bucket and enamel basins which were stacked by the side of the tent. They had also found for them those forgotten instruments of dignity named toothbrushes. They complained under their breath. The colonel preferred the work of orderlies, they said. He thought nurses an imposition. He was a regular soldier from India. The Australians had asked for a Medical Corps surgeon to run this hospital and the British army had taken the opportunity to dump the colonel into the job. He had brought a matron-in-chief who sided with him, and their Australian matron knuckled under to the two of them. Hence the colonel had a lot of time for both these women. But the staff nurses were supposed to be mute laborers. The man was a passable surgeon but behaved as if soldiers suffered dysentery out of willfulness.
A number of the other women who had been on the Archimedes met them in the mess tent and swapped their tales of redemption. Voraciously they ate fresh-baked bread and great cans of blackberry jam—the plainest food and the most soothing. Flies were thick around the condiments. Asked by Sally, would the rescued women have to go on duty that day, the experienced nurses of Lemnos laughed. Take it easy, you were only sunk a day ago, one said. It was an eon of a day though. It was long as one of the divine days from the start of Genesis.
And now they went in twos to visit Matron Mitchie. Sally made the pilgrimage with Naomi at her side. There were two cots in the tent where Mitchie lay with another matron—an English woman suffering pneumonia. Mitchie had color in her face. A little semicircular tent lay over what was left of her leg.
I was a dancer once, she told the Durance sisters as soon as she saw them. It was not any attempt at a joke. There was a glimmer of fever in her eye but not of delirium.
When I danced with the surgeon-in-chief at the hospital ball, people would stand by in a circle watching. I know you don’t believe me.
Both the sisters assured her they did.
A tide of pain ran over her face, and her mouth gaped like that of a woman twenty years older—a pleading, gummy mouth. So, said Mitchie when it passed, it is with a certain sadness… But poor women drowned, younger than me.
One could not doubt Mitchie’s grasp on the world. It seemed firmer than Sally’s.
They are mistaken, said Mitchie, if they think I will be hereafter content in a sedan chair.
She held up her hand.
You have met the officer commanding? I know you have. How I hate to leave you in his hands. But I am due my injection in half an hour. I have become quite the opium fiend. You’ll find me in the dens of Little Collins Street when you get home.
Her pain filled the tent and they felt forced in the end to retreat before it—to give it the room it vastly needed.
Orderlies delivered their meals in the mess. Beef and biscuit at night. Some of the men appointed to the job did not care to deliver that joyless tack with grace. They wiped their noses between placing enamel plates in front of the women. They did it because they had not been told they must not.
As Sally finished a letter to their father, Naomi asked whether she was up to an evening walk. They walked along paths marked with white-painted stones, emerged from the shadows of the Canadian hospital on the cliff and saw a lovely bluish light in a sky crowded by great fists of headlands on the low foreshores of the harbor. Vessels lay at anchor in the lazy mauve water of Mudros. In silhouette they were washed clear of any military purpose. They seemed to be there to lend perspective in the great bowl of stone and pasture and sky and sea.
In terms of their friendship, it still had the color of novelty. They chatted about the state of their gang: Nettice’s mute face but her forehead locked into an unrelenting frown. She might simply need glasses, suggested Sally. Freud, said Naomi, looked as though she’d seen everything. As if nothing surprised her. Yet she seemed very surprised underneath. Honora? Leo? Well, with those two you got what you expected or at least you hoped you did. They were more knowable than Freud was.
Who would look after poor Mitchie in old age? Hadn’t she mentioned a brother in Tasmania? Mitchie—they agreed—would make a very rebellious invalid.
Naomi then said something unlikely. I have had no periods. Not since April.
This was friendship then. This was the sort of thing friends gave ear to.
And, said Naomi, I haven’t accommodated any man. So it’s not a pregnancy.
Sally’s face reddened at this sort of unusual conversation. But Naomi reflected her own bewilderment. She too had missed what she had been trained to call her “time,” for three or four months. Had others? She had seen no sign of the curse of Eve in any of them—no bloodied cloths or toweling hurriedly unpinned from belts beneath nightshirts to be dropped in the soaking bucket.
It’s called amenorrhea, Naomi informed her. Another thing, I don’t daydream about men at all. I’m indifferent to them except as patients. Has that happened to you?
Sally gathered herself. Daydream about men? She must get used to the pace of this new friendship and even to the concept that Naomi had once daydreamed about men, however indifferent she was to them now.
Sally said, I’m still waiting for June’s and it’s already nearly August.
Poor girl, said Naomi softly. Were you worried?
I thought I might ask Mitchie… But then…
Things will return to normal. The triage and the damned wounds. And now, the Archimedes going down. That won’t help.